Marketers who are worth their salt have known it for years. If you want your audience to take a specific action, you actually have to ask them to do it — in email, in display ads, on landing pages, blog articles — you name it. But for whatever reason, it seems like once we started using social media for marketing, we collectively forgot all about calls-to-action (CTAs).

Let’s end that now. I’ve long been a proponent of using calls-to-action in social media. In fact, my research actually proves that tweets that include the call-to-action phrase “please retweet” get more retweets — 4X more, in fact. But what about the impact of CTAs within other social networks … like Facebook?

To gauge the success of different types of CTA phrases on Facebook, I turned my attention to more than 1.2 million posts from the top 10,000 most Liked Facebook Pages. I specifically looked at Facebook posts that included the words “like,” “comment,” or “share,” and found that they tend to garner more of the specific action they referenced compared to posts that didn’t include those words. Check it out …

Remember — Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm rewards “engagement” on your Facebook posts. In other words, posts that attract a lot of engagement in terms of actions such as Likes, shares, and comments will be rewarded with greater visibility in users’ News Feeds. And isn’t that what all marketers want?

So if you’re trying to increase the reach of your content on Facebook, consider experimenting with social CTAs in your Facebook posts. Phrases like “leave a comment/Like this post/share this post if …” may do wonders to spark engagement among your Facebook Page fans and visitors.

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